In 2000 the OECD, a group of mostly rich countries, decided to find out how much children were learning at school. At the time, only half of Brazil’s children finished primary education. Three out of four adults were functionally illiterate and more than one in ten totally so. And yet few Brazilians seemed to care. Rich parents used private schools; poor ones knew too little to understand how badly their children were being short-changed in public schools. The president at the time, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, saw a chance to break their complacency. Though Brazil is not a member of the OECD, he entered it in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Brazil came last.
A decade later, it is clear that the shock was salutary. On December 7 the fourth PISA study was published, and Brazil showed impressive gains in all three subjects tested: reading, maths and science. The test now involves 65 countries. Brazil came 53rd in reading and science. The OECD is sufficiently impressed to have selected Brazil as a case study of ‘Encouraging lessons from a large federal system’.
The OECD highlights that Cardoso’s reforms of school funding in the 1990s, which mandated minimum per-pupil spending and teacher salaries, made a huge difference in the poorest areas. His government also started to pay poor families to keep their children in school. The report praises the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for continuing and extending both policies.
Barbara Bruns, an economist at the World Bank who has written a book about Brazilian schools, praises the system created over the past 15 years, of rating schools on how much students learn and how many of them drop out or repeat grades. “From a starting point of having no information on student learning, the two presidencies constructed one of the world’s most impressive systems for measuring education results,” she says.
Bruns sees hope in thousands of innovative education schemes across Brazil. Some are run by foundations: Itaú Social, the charitable arm of a big bank, is coaching teachers in struggling schools, paying for parent-school liaison workers and training head teachers in management. Others are led by a new breed of public-sector managers: São Paulo state has created a career track for teachers who do well on tests of subject knowledge; the city of Rio de Janeiro is tackling teacher absenteeism by giving schools bonuses for hitting targets — to be shared only among teachers with good attendance records. If Brazil does make the grade, it will be because it has managed to spread such innovative practices everywhere.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)